Monthly Archives: August 2016

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When you think of an effective leader, several characteristics likely come to mind: confident, capable, adaptable. Less obvious are the abilities to conserve capacity by being selective about the projects he or she agrees to take on and then quickly recognizing his or her own demand-to-capacity gaps if the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands should spike.

Stories are the programming language of culture. The stories people share in an organization reinforce the underlying beliefs and assumptions that shape the culture. To shift culture, reprogram it with new stories.

People sometimes tell me that The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) helped them understand the difference between great team experiences and terrible team experiences. These readers recognized the value of what my co-author, Doug Smith, and I called a “real team” — a team composed of people committed to common purposes, goals, and working approaches accepting of the diversity in others’ skills and perspectives. In real teams, members hold themselves and their teammates mutually accountable, because of their emotional commitment to the work and to one another. That’s how they get things done rapidly and effectively.

Caring for Culture
Caring for your culture is not an annual event or even a monthly event. Just like sleeping and eating, caring for your culture is a daily activity that requires an investment of your time and attention. Caring involves Clarity, Accountability, Relationships and Esteem.

What do we do when we just can’t take anymore? Some of us completely unplug our minds, others explode into a state of hysteria; some of us bang our heads against walls, others run away to the sanctuary of the bar to buy a stiff drink, whilst the tee-total amongst us drink the equivalent strength of an alcohol beverage in coffee. Whether you fall into any of these categories is largely irrelevant, for they all share the same common trait, which I term ‘the emotional tipping point’.